From protecting particular places to warding off global warming, in 2006, Bay Chapter volunteers brought about changes

As the local arm of a national organization, what is the role of the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter? Should we focus on our local area, or should we be working on the Sierra Club's national and global campaigns?

In 2006 the Chapter, and its component regional groups, did both - and with major success!

A sustainable energy future - making the Bay Area a model for the nation

The Sierra Club's highest-priority national campaign is Smart Energy Solutions - moving the world towards renewable and sustainable energy sources to stave off the threat of global warming. As the U.S. government stagnates, we must focus on local actions that can serve as models for other localities and eventually for the necessary national and worldwide effort. (The March-April Yodeler will focus on energy and global warming, with emphasis on California and the Bay Area.)

One of California's most promising options is Community Choice Aggregation. This procedure, enabled by a recent state law, allows local governments to take charge of their electric power, purchasing energy to serve the interests of consumers and the environment rather than just those of corporations. We have been working very hard at City Hall in San Francisco to keep CCA on track and are confident now that it is in the hands of the Supervisors to move on it in January - and that the move will lead to great reductions in carbon emissions. One definite piece of progress in 2006 was our submission of an implementation plan.

In addition, we are starting efforts towards Community Choice in Marin and Alameda Counties. Through this campaign we are well on the way to showing how large cities can do their share to cut their use of fossil fuels and production of greenhouse gases.

This past year our Chapter Energy Committee also undertook a very hands-on project - a survey of the fees charged by local governments for installation of residential solar systems. Using a process pioneered by our neighbors in the Loma Prieta Chapter Energy Committee, we surveyed local governments and publicized the results. Many cities were surprised to learn that their fees were high enough to significantly discourage solar-energy use, and they have been responding by cutting these fees. As a result, the costs to homeowners for installing solar systems are coming down, and we expect to see more installations. Two cities in our chapter, Fairfax and Sausalito, have actually eliminated these fees altogether.

Another large source of greenhouse-gas emissions is transportation. The Chapter is engaged in a host of efforts to encourage alternatives to cars, including cities so compact and convenient that residents walk to the stores and restaurants. (These efforts also help to limit sprawl development and lead to healthier cities in many ways.)

In San Francisco we strongly supported changes in the city's parking requirements for the downtown area. Instead of the previous requirement of at least one parking space for every new residential unit (for most of the downtown), the city has now implemented a maximum of 3/4 space per downtown unit, with no minimum. This is a significant step in the city's sometimes-neglected policy of favoring transit, walking, biking, and other alternatives to the car.

We also succeeded at reinvigorating the project for a new Transbay Terminal. Although our campaign for Measure C on the June ballot (to change the composition of the board overseeing the terminal project) did not win, we believe that it helped motivate the Planning Department to come forward with a plan to build three office towers in the project area. These towers, if approved, will help provide a viable funding source for constructing the terminal.

Also, through running a simple announcement in the Yodeler, we recruited two promising new members for the city's Pedestrian Safety Advisory Committee. Group leader Ruth Gravanis was appointed to the city's Commission on the Environment.

Preserving the shoreline

Year after year, the Bay Chapter focuses a large portion of our efforts on protecting our shorelines - both Bay and ocean. 2006 was a year of major successes.

Perhaps this year's biggest victory came when the Board of the East Bay Regional Park District voted to acquire most of Breuner Marsh through eminent domain. The campaign to protect and restore this precious wetland in North Richmond has been one of the Chapter's highest conservation priorities, and we played a central role in organizing a broad coalition of environmental and community organizations for it. In addition to its biological value, Breuner is a very important open space to the adjacent African-American community of Parchester Village. Unfortunately, the Park District is not acquiring the upland portion of the site, and we will have to be vigilant to prevent inappropriate development there. We see the success at Breuner as the springboard for a larger campaign to win protection for other open spaces and wetlands in North Richmond.

The community of Albany has been standing up to a big developer who wants to build a megamall on Albany's shoreline. The Sierra Club, in collaboration with Citizens for the Albany Shoreline and Citizens for East Shore Parks, drafted and circulated an initiative to create a proactive shoreline planning process, and gathered signatures from over 25% of the city's voters. The race-track owner sued and got the initiative dropped from the ballot, and then the developer announced that it had dropped its proposal (for now; we expect a new version of the proposal eventually). The City Council has agreed to start a planning process that we hope will accomplish our central goal: to make sure that decisions about the future of the shoreline are directed by the community, not by developers. That's why the Bay Chapter made intensive efforts to elect new councilmembers who are committed to protecting the shoreline, and indeed our candidates, Marge Atkinson and Joanne Wile, won in November.

We got to celebrate many years of Bay Chapter efforts with the dedication ceremony on Oct. 4 for the Eastshore State Park.

In Oakland we have worked with numerous other organizations to block inappropriate development at the Oak-to-Ninth project along the shoreline. These lands were supposed to become one of the most significant new parks in the Bay Area, but instead the City Council approved a project that would reduce the open space and block it off from good public access. In response, we helped gather signatures for a referendum challenging the Council's action. We wish to preserve the affordable housing included in the current proposal, but are insisting on improvements to the project in public health, preservation of the original half of the Ninth Avenue Terminal, safe pedestrian and bicycle passages, transportation, and schools. A court has invalidated the referendum based on technicalities, but legal action continues, with Sierra Club support, for getting it reinstated.

Another shoreline victory came in October when the city dropped a plan for building a container port in the marsh at the mouth of Wildcat Creek in Richmond. When the idea was initially broached publicly, we and so many others immediately attacked the destructive plan, that it fell apart within months.

The Chapter, in particular our Marin Group, has been working with the Sierra Club's statewide Great Coastal Places Campaign and the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin to protect the Tomales Dunes, the largest unprotected dune system in central California, and its 14 threatened and endangered species. For decades a huge off-road-vehicle campground has operated on the dunes and its adjacent wetlands without required permits. We have finally gotten the state Coastal Commission to take notice, and as the Yodeler goes to press, we are waiting word about what enforcement action it may take at its December meeting.

Our shoreline efforts are not limited to the Chapter's borders. We have worked with the Great Coastal Places Campaign to protect the Del Monte Forest in Pebble Beach, one of the few remaining native stands of Monterey pines. The Pebble Beach Company, seeing that Monterey County was about to reject its plan, withdrew its proposal to chop down 17,000 pines to build another golf course. We expect the company to return with a new and equally objectionable plan, and we will be ready to object when the time comes.

Other Bay Area open spaces

The Club has been working for over a decade - most recently with the local grassroots group, Preserve Lamorinda Open Space - to limit Moraga's Palos Colorados development proposal. In the early '90s this proposal included nearly 200 homes and an 18-hole golf course on 460 acres of key wildlife habitat. Hundreds of trees would have been cut, over 10,000 feet of creek would have been filled, and several hundred acres would have been graded. After years of sustained pressure from environmentalists and the community, the project has been scaled back to 123 homes, and in March the developer announced that the golf course would be eliminated entirely. As a result, 80% of the land can be left in its natural condition, only 15 trees (nearly all non-native) will be cut, and there will be great reductions in grading, wetland fill, pesticide use, and traffic. This decision is largely due to environmentalists' efforts to persuade state and federal agencies to look carefully at the project's impacts.

In January we helped persuade the Board of the East Bay Regional Park District to vote against building a group camp in Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve. The camp would have encroached on a key wildlife corridor - and would have been at a bad location for camping anyhow. Our Chapter's East Bay Public Lands Committee helped lead the efforts to reject this proposal.

In Pittsburg, where voters in 2005 approved a misleading ballot measure that actually opened up the hills to additional development, we won a stunning victory in August, when the otherwise pro-development Council put off indefinitely its vote to annex 768 acres, without any environmental review first, for a housing project. The Council's hesitation was due to our organizing efforts to alert Pittsburg residents to the threat to their hillsides. As a result, dozens of concerned residents showed up at Council meetings and wrote letters urging the city to withhold approval. Unfortunately this victory is not a permanent one, since the Council can bring back the issue any time; we must therefore be continuously vigilant to insist that the city must not approve any new annexations or developments without first doing adequate environmental study. These efforts include our successful support for the re-election of open-space champion Michael Kee to the City Council in November.

In Alameda County we persuaded the Board of Supervisors to acknowledge that it had failed to implement a land-use law for protecting threatened riparian habitat and water quality. The Club urged the county to come into compliance with this 29-year-old law and adopt a moratorium on development adjacent to streams. Unfortunately, despite promises from supervisors, the moratorium was significantly weakened to include only a small part of the area that the law is supposed to protect. We will continue to watch to make sure that the county finally comes into compliance with its own rules for protecting streamside lands.

Some important open space is in urban areas. For years the San Francisco Group has defended the city's natural areas, and we were delighted when in August the Recreation and Park Commission finally approved a Significant Natural Areas Management Plan, which can now undergo environmental review and final approval. We will continue to shepherd this plan to final approval, because it is essential that the city use thought-out and ecologically sound methods for taking care of its remaining remnants of natural habitat.

And of course we do not neglect other wild lands throughout the nation. The Chapter Wilderness Committee was one of many organizations that helped to get Congress to pass and President Bush in October to sign the Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Wilderness Act, protecting more than 270,000 acres of wild lands in northwestern California. With the success of that campaign, our activists could turn their attention from north to south, and applauded as Rep. Mary Bono introduced the California Desert and Mountain Heritage Act to protect another 125,000 acres of wildlands in Riverside County. In September we received good news about another one of our campaigns, that a court had ordered the Interior Department to stop plans for oil and gas leases in the rich wildlife lands around Teshekpuk Lake in Alaska. We continue to work to protect the wildlands of California and all other states.

Making our cities better places

As a largely urban chapter, we work to improve our cities, both because the cities form the environment for millions of people and because healthy cities reduce the pressure for sprawl development elsewhere that eats up open space.

A remarkable series of victories came in Hercules, where Wal-Mart is trying to bully the city into allowing it to build a Super center near the Bay in an area where the city is trying to develop a new pedestrian-friendly city center. In February Wal-Mart, seeing that its plan was going to be rejected, withdrew it, and then in March the City Council instructed the city manager to make an offer to buy the land. Later that month Wal-Mart returned with a slightly modified version of the plan. So far the city has been holding firm. Worldwide, Wal-Mart has played hardball politics and legal action to force communities to accept its plans. To see a small city stand up so valiantly - and for the right reasons - is an almost historic exception.

Our San Francisco Group has been working with Citizens to Save the Waterfront and numerous other organizations to improve plans for Piers 27 - 31 in San Francisco. In March the Port Commission voted to drop developer Mills Corp. with its plan for a megamall. We are watching carefully to see that the new developer creates a plan that will maximize safe public access to the shoreline, and that will minimize negative impacts such as traffic and interference with transit.

In Berkeley, our Northern Alameda County Group participated actively in the city process for preparing a creeks ordinance. The ordinance passed on Nov. 28 addresses most of our concerns about protecting the city's creeks in a way that property-owners can live with.

We had the creeks ordinance specially in mind as we worked to re-elect the environmentally supportive incumbents on the City Council.

Our West Contra Costa County Group worked with the Richmond Sunshine Alliance to get the Richmond City Council in January to repeal an ordinance that allowed Chevron to perform most construction projects at its huge refinery without city oversight.

The San Francisco Group helped persuade San Francisco City College to rewrite its sustainability plan.

You, the volunteers

All this couldn't have happened without the tremendous efforts of you, the volunteers, members, readers.

This summer the Chapter repeated our Volunteer Training Series for members who want to become more involved and more effective at working on conservation issues.

We held three introductory trainings, three advanced sessions, and one all-day training. We trained over 100 people - about twice as many as the year before - who left inspired, enthusiastic, and well-equipped with new skills for creating more environmental victories for our communities. Many attendees went on to collect letters, make phone calls, turn out at hearings, walk precincts, and organize environmental-advocacy events. They made a critical difference in our election victories this fall.

Stay tuned for our 2007 Training Series this spring and summer!

As we plan our conservation and organizing work for 2007, we'd love your input on what you'd like to see a Chapter training on. If there are particular skills you'd like us to focus on, now is the time to give input, by contacting or call (510) 848-0800, ext. 307.

Donald Forman